User blog:Gearoid/Week 4
From the weekend of the third week until the beginning of the fourth week, I investigated the possibility of incorporating the LEAP Motion Sensor into our project. The user places their hands above the sensor, which then tracks hand and finger movements, allowing the user to interact with the computer without direct contact. I began by installing the sensor onto my laptop, and testing out the device’s basic functionalities with the relevant tutorials that come pre-installed with the device. The tutorials ranged from picking up cubes and placing them on top of moving characters, to grabbing and plucking the petals of a flower until it was bare. Following this, I also tried a variety of other applications downloaded from the sensor’s app store, such as Kyoto, “an interactive ambient puzzle game that serves as an homage to the magical city of Kyoto, Japan”, and Sculpting, a 3-D modelling program. There were several performance issues however, as the sensor was slow to react to sudden changes of hand and finger movements, and oftentimes, crashed unexpectedly. The sensor was also tested on a high-end desktop computer, and there was a notable improvement in the reaction times and tracking of the user’s movements. The sensor was also set up in a way that allowed the user to change basic settings on the computer without contact, for example, swiping your hand to the left across the sensor would decrease the volume on the computer. In spite of this however, it was clear that there were many performance issues with the sensor. Due to the fact that it was slow to react to sudden movements or misinterpreted certain gestures, the sensor often left the users feeling frustrated and the novelty of the motion control quickly wore off. The sensor’s capabilities were presented to the rest of the group on the 30/06/2015 and it was agreed that even though the device had potential, that we would hold off on working with it at this present time, and look at integrating the sensor into our project at a later development stage. During the meeting, Gemma worked on the Moodboard and adding the newest images contributed by myself, which were images of a wormhole, blackhole, and an infinity mirror. We spoke of trying to incorporate the college’s 3-D printer into our project, and Rich agreed to get in contact with Glenn about its availability, and Niamh also agreed to get in contact with Mads about the progress of our grant application. The rest of the week was spent researching blackholes and in particular, how to replicate their effects and appearance in an animation that could be brought into a 3-D environment. If our aim is to create a deeply immersive experience for the users, then it is imperative that the animation is as realistic as possible and gives users a sense of what actually happens if an object were to actually enter a blackhole. Whilst there is obviously no definitive explanation of what actually happens to an object once it enters the hole, there are many theories offered by scientists and many of them seem to involve a complete distortion of time and objects being stretched or “spaghettified”. Black holes warp space and time to such an extreme that inside the black hole's horizon, space and time actually swap roles. In a sense, it really is time that pulls you in toward the singularity. You can't turn around and escape the black hole, any more than you can turn around and travel back to the past. So the challenge then is to recreate the effects one were to feel if they were to get caught in a black hole’s gravitational pull and this feeling of inevitability that once you enter a black hole, you are unable to escape. More information is available here: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/fall_in.html http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150525-a-black-hole-would-clone-you Category:Blog posts